MORNING LIST
An ascent to the summits where two drawing schools intersect, an invisible war in the footsteps of the soldiers of Operation “Sentinel”, bodies missing on the border between Mexico and the United States, a Hollywood fiction relocated to Marseille , the last moments of life before euthanasia, but also a little ecology to think about the future. This is what the films that hit theaters this week are offering moviegoers.
“The Summit of the Gods”: poetry of the peaks
It was necessary to imagine it, and especially to dare it, this crossing between two drawing schools, certainly at the antipodes, but which nevertheless had things to say to each other: the Franco-Belgian line, generally qualified as “clear” , and the Japanese manga, with its graphic dynamism and its sense of division. A perfect meeting ground was offered as on a plateau in the work of Jiro Taniguchi, designer of the unforgettable Distant neighborhood, born in 1947, whose detailed realism and Proustian resonances did not mask their European tendency. It is precisely in this fund that the host Patrick Imbert went to draw (The Big Bad Fox and other tales, 2017) to bring to the screen The Summit of the Gods, based on the eponymous five-volume manga published by Taniguchi between 2000 and 2003, itself taken from a novel by writer Baku Yumemakura.
Set in the midst of mountaineering, the story skillfully juggles multiple strata of time. Fukamachi, a Japanese mountain photo reporter, is investigating a mysterious camera that would have belonged to the pioneer climbers of Everest and would be likely to question the date of their first ascent. Far from any exoticism as from any pastiche, the film is a tremendous success which testifies above all to a scrupulous respect for the original material, which it never seeks, and very fortunately, to westernize. Rather, it would be a kind of translation into the neighboring language of animation. Mathieu macheret
French and Luxembourgish animated film by Patrick Imbert (1 h 30).
“The Third War”: the security of the times
So what is this war evoked from the title of the first feature film by young Italian director Giovanni Aloi, shot in France and in French? No longer the traditional war with its front lines and its declared antagonisms, but an invisible, diffuse, integrated war, capable of breaking out anywhere and at any time. The same one that Manuel Valls had named in 2015 “War on terrorism”. Less than a subject to be treated, it is a social malaise that thus seeks to diagnose The Third War, that of a France on the verge of implosion.
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